NAPM Pushes FCC To OK Proposed Telcordia Contract Promptly; Others Disagree

"Time is of the essence for approval of the New MSA. Under the current MSA with Neustar, the cost of NPAC [Number Portability Administration Center] services to the industry is nearly $500M per year," said an NAPM filing Monday in docket 09-109 on meetings with aides to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and three other commissioners, plus Wireline Bureau officials. "The cost of NPAC services to the industry under the New MSA will be significantly less than half of the cost of Neustar provided NPAC services, and it will reduce each year over the term of the New MSA. Accordingly, the cost of delay is significant, and the industry will lose out on tens of millions of dollars in savings for each month that transition is unnecessarily delayed." The FCC had no comment.

A draft FCC order to approve the new MSA is pending, but a lawsuit by a former Telcordia employee said the company hadn't been compliant with its national security duties (see 1604260049), an allegation Telcordia has denied. The FCC and Telcordia agreed the company would start over on NPAC coding after the agency learned that initial work was inconsistent with its March 2015 LNPA selection order (see 1604290056).

Telcordia/iconectiv said the contract and a related NPAC application satisfy all the requirements of the commission’s selection order. "The Selection Order contemplated that the Wireline Competition and Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureaus would ensure that any and all national security issues would be addressed and mitigated to the Commission’s satisfaction, including through post-selection mitigation," emailed Sharon Oddy, iconectiv vice president-corporate communications. "By building a new NPAC application, Telcordia has fully mitigated any possible security issues. The contract is in the record with specific requirements as to the staffing used to develop the NPAC application. There is no reason to further delay moving forward with approving the proposed contract."

The new MSA has "greatly improved, robust provisions regarding data security and privacy that were developed in coordination with the FCC and various federal agencies, including those responsible for law enforcement and homeland security," NAPM said in its filing. It also incorporates "lessons learned" by NAPM over the decades since the beginning of local number portability, which allows consumers to keep their phone numbers when switching carriers.

NAPM said that if the MSA isn't approved soon, "the transition dates may have to be extended beyond the third quarter of 2017, which means that the dates would likely have to be extended into the first quarter of 2018 due to the hold on NPAC changes, because of significant increased porting activity, during the holidays. Therefore, it is critical that the FCC approve the New MSA within days."

NAPM said there is no reason to delay MSA approval "while the FCC disposes of" Neustar's appeal of a bureau protective order, under which the entire contract was originally submitted in redacted form. The appeal "has no merit" and "is now moot" anyway after a new version of the MSA was filed "with far fewer redactions," it said. "The remaining Highly Confidential portions of the New MSA relate to data security, and thus they must remain Highly Confidential in order to protect critical infrastructure," NAPM said. "The remaining Confidential portions of the New MSA relate to issues that would compromise a potential rebid (e.g., pricing, and financial penalties). While the NAPM LLC is confident that the courts will reject Neustar’s challenges to the bidding process, the NAPM LLC must protect the integrity of the bidding process until the conclusion of any and all related legal proceedings."

A group representing small and midsized carriers responded Tuesday. "The NAPM letter is remarkable as much for what it says as for what it does not say," emailed the LNPA Alliance, which wants the FCC to give its members time to review the MSA. "The implication is that NAPM and iconectiv would be on schedule if only the FCC would immediately approve the iconectiv MSA is simply wrong. But in order to meet the artificial Q317 deadline, iconectiv has already cut its LNPA Transition intervals for both testing and data migration in half. They should not be short-circuiting the quality of the LNPA Transition just to meet an artificial deadline."

"That NAPM and iconectiv are behind on their timeline has nothing to do with the smaller carriers that are being denied a chance to review the MSA," the LNP Alliance added. "Iconectiv reportedly had to rebuild their database from scratch due to their own security lapses. They also delayed the filing of a public version of the MSA for a month so that smaller carriers only received the MSA less than a week ago. The large NAPM carriers have had the MSA for over seven months but expect smaller carriers and the public to review the 2,800-page contract in one week. Why would the Commission finally require the MSA to be publicly released just last week, only to seal it off again a week later by voting to approve it without any input from smaller carriers and the public at large?"

Neustar had urged the FCC Monday to require Telcordia to file in the public record all ex parte communications with commission staff about Ericsson's compliance with its duties under the FCC's March 2015 LNPA selection order, including any on agency resolution of violations. "The Commission must also provide a sufficient opportunity to review these disclosures prior to adopting any order approving the MSA between Ericsson and the NAPM,” Neustar said. It had no comment Tuesday.